The Nine-Tenths Part 37

"Isn't there some way I can help?"

A strange expression came to his face, of surprise, of wonder.

"_You_ help?"

"Yes--I--"

"Mr. Blaine! Mr. Blaine!" Some one across the room was calling. "There's an employer here to see you!"

Joe leaped up, took Myra's hand, and spoke hastily.

"Wait and meet my mother. And come again--sometime. Sometime when I'm not so rushed!"

And he was gone--gone out of the room.

Myra arose, still warm with the touch of his hand--for his hand was almost fever-warm. All that she knew was that he had suffered and was suffering, and that she must help. She was burning now with an eagerness to learn about the strike, to understand what it was that so depressed and enslaved him, what it was that was slowly killing him. Her old theories met the warm clasp of life and vanished. She forgot her viewpoint and her delicacy. Life was too big for her shallow philosophy.

It seized upon her now and absorbed her.

She strode back to the young girl, who she learned later was named Rhona Hemlitz, and who was but seventeen years old.

She said: "Tell me about the strike! Can't we sit down together and talk? Have you time?"

"I have a little time," said Rhona, eagerly. "We can sit here!"

So they sat side by side and Rhona told her. Rhona's whole family was engaged in sweat-work. They lived in a miserable tenement over in Hester Street, where her mother had been toiling from dawn until midnight with the needle, with her tiny brother helping to sew on b.u.t.tons, "finishing"

daily a dozen pairs of pants, and making--_thirty cents_.

Myra was amazed.

"Thirty cents--dawn till midnight! Impossible!"

And then her father--who worked all day in a sweatshop.

"And you--what did you do?" asked Myra.

Rhona told her. She had worked in Zandler's shirtwaist factory--bending over a power-machine, whose ten needles made forty-four hundred st.i.tches a minute. So fast they flew that a break in needle or thread ruined a shirtwaist; hence, never did she allow her eyes to wander, never during a day of ten to fourteen hours, while, continuously, the needles danced up and down like flashes of steel or lightning. At times it seemed as if the machine were running away from her and she had to strain her body to keep it back. And so, when she reeled home late at night, her smarting eyes saw sharp showers of needles in the air every time she winked, and her back ached intolerably.

"I never dreamt," said Myra, "that people had to work like that!"

"Oh, that's not all!" said Rhona, and went on. Her wages were rarely over five dollars a week, and for months, during slack season, she was out of work--came daily to the factory, and had to sit on a bench and wait, often fruitlessly. And then the sub-contracting system, whereunder the boss divided the work among lesser bosses who each ran a gang of toilers, speeding them up mercilessly, "sweating" them! And so the young girls, sixteen to twenty-five years old, were sapped of health and joy and womanhood, and, "as Mr. Joe wrote, the future is robbed of wives and mothers!"

Myra was amazed. She had a new glimpse of the woman problem. She saw now how millions of women were being fed into the machine of industry, and that thus the home was pa.s.sing, youth was filched of its glory, and the race was endangered. This uprising of the women, then, meant more than she dreamed--meant the attempt to save the race by freeing the women from this bondage. Had they not a right then to go out in the open, to strike, to lead marches, to sway meetings, to take their places with men?

Such thoughts, confused and swift, came to her, and she asked Rhona what had happened. How had the strike started? First, said Rhona, there was the strike at Marrin's--a spark that set off the other places. Then at Zandler's conditions had become so bad that one morning Jake Hedig, her boss, a young, pale-faced, black-haired man, suddenly arose and shouted in a loud voice throughout the shop:

"I am sick of slave-driving. I resign my job."

The boss, and some of the little bosses, set upon him, struck him, and dragged him out, but as he went he shouted l.u.s.tily:

"Brothers and sisters, are you going to sit by your machines and see a fellow-worker used this way?"

The machines stopped: the hundreds of girls and the handful of men marched out simultaneously. Then, swiftly the sedition had spread about the city until a great night in Cooper Union, when, after speeches of peace and conciliation, one of the girls had risen, demanded and secured the floor, and moved a general strike. Her motion was unanimously carried, and when the chairman cried, in Yiddish: "Do you mean faith?

Will you take the old Jewish oath?" up went two thousand hands, with one great chorus:

"If I turn traitor to the cause I now pledge, may this hand wither from the arm I now raise."

By this oath Rhona was bound. And so were thirty thousand others--Americans, Italians, Jews--and with them were some of the up-town women, some of the women of wealth, some of the big lawyers and the labor-leaders and reformers.

"Some of the up-town women!" thought Myra. She was amazed to find herself so interested, so wrought up. And she felt as if she had stumbled upon great issues and great struggles; she realized, dimly, that first moment, that this strike was involved in something larger, something vaster--swallowed up in the advance of democracy, in the advance of woman. All the woman in her responded to the call to arms.

And she was discovering now what Joe had meant by his "crisis"--what he had meant by his fight for "more democracy; a better and richer life; a superber people on earth. It was a real thing. She burned now to help Joe--she burned to do for him--to enter into his tragic struggle--to be of use to him.

"What are you going to do now?" she asked Rhona.

"Now? Now I must go picketing."

"What's picketing?"

"March up and down in front of a factory and try to keep scabs out."

"What are scabs?" asked ignorant Myra.

Rhona was amazed.

"You don't even know that? Why, a scab's a girl who tries to take a striker's job and so ruin the strike. She takes the bread out of our mouths."

"But how can you stop her?"

"Talk to her! We're not allowed to use violence."

"How do you do it?"

Rhona looked at the eager face, the luminous gray eyes.

"Would you like to see it?"

"Yes, I would."

"But it's dangerous."

"How so?"

"Police and thugs, b.u.ms hanging around."

"And you girls aren't afraid?"

Rhona smiled.